“Do you like hiking?” I ask, at the exact same moment he says, “What did the police want with you the other day?”

There is no question as to whose conversation starter is the more compelling. Mine hops out of my mouth and lands on the sand between us, where it sinks away like sea foam. His hangs in the air—a big bully of a topic, demanding an answer.

The possibility of saying that I don’t want to talk about it doesn’t even occur to me. He has asked, and I must answer. The silence between us must be banished.

“They came to talk about the day my father and I were attacked in the farmhouse. They said the insurance people had raised certain questions.”

“How strange, after all this time. Do you think they have new leads?”

“It didn’t seem like it. They kept asking me if I knew them—the men who attacked me. If my father knew them. If we’d ever seen them before. But we hadn’t. They were strangers.”

“In Coetzee’s book they weren’t strangers, were they?”

I am surprised to find that his mind runs on similar lines to mine. From my story to Coetzee’s story, and back again. Perhaps it is only because we have spoken about it. He knows it is a preoccupation of mine.

“That’s right. In Coetzee’s book, Lucy and her father both knew the men. They were labourers who worked on the farm, plus a wildcard character who was known to be volatile. It was an intimate crime—between people who had known each other a long time. In my case, it was a crime between strangers.”

“Do you think they believed you?”

Again, the workings of his mind astonish me. He has put his finger on precisely what has been troubling me.

“No. I don’t know why, but they didn’t believe me. They wanted to question my father and me separately from each other. They wouldn’t allow me to warn him that they were coming. It was as though they didn’t want us to collaborate—to have time to get our stories straight.”

“That is certainly strange. You were the victims of this crime. Do you have any theories?”

I want to end this conversation on the grounds that it is making me unhappy, but to do so would take more resolution than I am capable of.

“I think they don’t believe me. They suspect that my father and I invented the rape story between us and set fire to the house ourselves to get the insurance money.”

Eugene looks taken aback. “But you were examined, weren’t you? They have evidence proving what happened to you.”

He sounds so certain, so quod erat demonstrandum. He has no idea of the extent to which a rape victim feels disbelieved. But he is right. They do have physical evidence. Unless they have lost it.